How Star Wars was saved in the edit

A video essay exploring how Star Wars’ editors recut and rearranged Star Wars: A New Hope to create the cinematic classic it became.

This RocketJump video essay has been doing the rounds, but it’s well worth watching if you haven’t seen it. It is full of examples that demonstrate the power of editing and includes some quality Star Wars trivia and fascinating deleted scene footage.

• Samuel R. Delany’s 1977 review of the original Star Wars — “This film is going to do very well, if not phenomenally so…”
• The Plinkett Test: How to sort characters from cut-outs — Game critic and writer Andy Kelly uses a clever test to identify if characters in video games he plays actually qualify as characters.
• ILM’s concept art for ‘The Force Awakens’ — “Out of our brainstorming sessions emerged visual imagery of where we might want to go and what it would look like when we got there.”

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Housekeeping note

Anyone checking on this blog would have noticed that in the last three months there has only been one post. I was struck by the technological tragedy of my iMac’s graphics card dying and I’ve been without a good computer since. A few days ago I finally acquired a nice refurbished Mac Mini and a new monitor and… ahh. It feels nice to be back.

I should get back to posting fairly regularly now, and I have a few links tucked away from the missing months to share too.